Breath of the Wild, Majora's Mask, Pride and Prejudice
asking the normal questions normal people care about, like, hey, is Zelda's story ever... you know... any good?
Sort of! Don’t get mad.
In the leadup to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, seemingly everyone was getting hyped up and independently returning to Breath of the Wild (including me, we’re all just living a script), which I had played about half of in 2018-19 and then apparently put down until… a month ago. In the time/pandemic that passed since then, I’d attempted playing a few other Zelda titles: Majora’s Mask and Link’s Awakening. These two are the oddities and weirdos’ favorites of the series – the surreal ones that almost seem to be trying to say something, or at least stumble closer to meaning through stranger stories built to serve stranger needs. Link’s Awakening is a maybe it’s all a dream kinda story (to the point where the co-creater of Twin Peaks casually dropped twenty years later that he met with them about ideas for the game), where as the game goes on you learn that the island you washed ashore on might all be the dream of a creature on the island, that the only way to go home might be to end the reality of the people you’ve met here. Majora’s Mask is essentially a story where a bullied child stumbles upon a source of immense dark power and starts destroying the world in strange ways imagined by a child – and, worse, a bullied child new to bullying: the moon is falling out of the sky, people’s bodies are warped into different shapes, and… maybe other stuff. It’s a little hard to say how much this one kid is actually responsible for, although the moon thing is fucked up enough tbh.
The story of basically every other Zelda game, however, is pretty much just oh no, you gotta save a princess from a bad dude again.
It’s worth noting that Majora’s Mask and Link’s Awakening are basically some of the only Zelda games without the actual character of Zelda in them. And, if we’re being honest here, “the character of Zelda” is… a generous description of Zelda.
Playing Breath of the Wild – a game firmly in the “you gotta save a princess from a bad dude” vein of Zelda stories – and Majora’s Mask sort of side by side did give me more of a sense of what kind of storytelling the Zelda series is actually good at. Because, like, there is nothing compelling about: will Link save Zelda this time again? Instead, the strength of these games – particularly highlighted by these two titles – is how much work all the background characters are doing.
Even though one of Breath of the Wild’s most interesting storytelling-married-with-gameplay idea is the game-spanning quest to find 12 places in the world where pictures were taken on your phone Sheikah Slate before you lost your memories - when you search out these locations, you get a short little cutscene of backstory. This is really cool! But the actual backstory is largely… extremely merely fine. This is mostly because the main characters of these stories are never very interesting: Zelda has the burden of the kingdom on her shoulders, various princes or sages or members of the 1% all need your help with something, and Link can’t even talk. Breath of the Wild gets a lot of credit for giving Zelda more personality, motivation, and conflict than in most titles in the series, but it’s all pretty firmly stock fantasy story. It’s too boring to recap. A magic princess hasn’t been able to use magic yet. The king is pushing her too hard. The greatest bird-person warrior who ever lived doesn’t think the player character is up to snuff. It’s all the kind of stuff a first-time Dungeons & Dragons DM could come up with. Some of the short flashbacks do flesh out Zelda the most she ever has been, and it makes it look like it’s telling a better story than it is because it does a pretty cool trick of selecting scenes of varying degrees of importance and focusing on semi-slice of life vibes, but she’s still little more than a stock character.
When Breath of the Wild ends… it just ends. Zelda returns, does some magic, says she’s been watching you, and asks if you remember her. In the “true” ending if you found all the memories (so presumably if you do remember her), there’s an extra scene where Zelda talks about some stuff on her mind but of confusing importance to the player (and probably to the overarching political stability of the region but this isn’t that type of story), partly because, yeah, you just wrapped up a story about two people who haven’t hung out in a hundred years. A vague note about rebuilding civilization and how only the two of them can do it (not that I was expecting this game to get into policy issues in the denoument, but unclear what help they’re actually going to provide) and a weird note about how Zelda can’t hear your sword speak anymore, figures her power has dwindled in the past hundred years (contradicting her arc where we literally just saw her finally use the power she was unable to use in almost every flashback), but feels ok about it. In terms of an ending that leaves the reader with The Point of the story (not an unreasonable thing to expect an ending to do), Breath of the Wild is apparently a story about someone else having already come to terms with a sacrifice they already made. Generously, you could add on: which they were able to do because they believed in a version of you who existed long ago.
But this isn’t what the player spends nearly the entire game doing. Basically everyone else – anyone whose name you’d never even pretend you’re going to remember – is where Zelda might actually tell a nice story, or at least a story insofar as the setting and populace are the story through implying lots and lots of small nice stories. By which I don’t quite mean Zelda’s secret storytelling strength is that it’s character-driven (see “Link can’t even talk” above), but rather that the world is full of characters. The further removed someone is from the main plot, the more likely they are to somehow be the most memorable characters in the game.
I wanna talk about this by first talking about finally reading Pride and Prejudice in my local, IRL friends book club, which we chose after a bunch of us realized, hey, I’ve never actually read that. And, you know, it’s not doing something dissimmilar. The actual narrative stakes are more so There than they are the reason this book stood the test of time. The “good” part of Pride and Prejudice isn’t “but wait! The estate is entailed! The daughters will be penniless when their father inevitably dies unless one of them marries rich!” That’s just the rules of the game. The “good” part is who shows up to play that game.
Pride and Prejudice holds up. The language and structure are still centuries old, but the dialogue is understandable and the humor still works. You get excited when the well-meaning boring doofus shows up to say 1000 words that could’ve been four. The younger sisters are so fucking embarrasing. You see where the parents are coming from but goodness have they gotten in their own way. The central romance is pretty good too, but it is wildly to the text’s benefit that they don’t exist in a vacuum. The social stakes that exist outside of the two of them are what really create everything memorable about this story.
With a silent protagonist, Zelda titles naturally have to do a similar storytelling trick and surround the main characters with supporting characters who clearly consider themselves the main characters. Breath of the Wild has one town with an exclusively female society - the Gerudo - which nevertheless has a large subset of citizens fretting about their desire to leave home and find love somewhere. One of the game’s weirdest, longest quests involves you unintentionally setting one of them up with the extremely just-a-guy Bolson, a builder setting up a new village in the post-apocalyptic landscape of the game. She doesn’t seem that into the union, but in a weirdly pleasant way, where she doesn’t seem to be settling, but she seems to have just kind of grown a bit in the background and calibrated her expectations and what would realistically make her happy. While you’re off, like, fighting monsters and training in ancient underground shrines and shit. Majora’s Mask has an impressively varied cast for a game using 2000-era technical limitations. There’s a butler quietly grieving his son, a fish-man guitarist who dies trying to save his bandmate (subtext maybe lover???)’s unborn children (I can’t decide if writing that or “eggs” in the context of anthropomorphic fish is less creepy-sounding), and there’s so much shit going on in the central town of the game that I found cutscenes I didn’t know existed in my first three times trying to play this game where the mayor, capital-greedy festival organizers, and public servants are arguing about whether the moon apparently falling out of the sky is a legitimate threat to public safety. Not every character is a winner, makes much sense, gets much to do, or is particularly unique, but their problems are nonetheless why I’ve tried multiple times over the years to finish playing this game.
My point being that whether the main characters actually get to be characters or not, it helps to have them exist like any of us do: bouncing off other people with their own motivations who don’t really think about the main character once they’re out of the room.
I thought I was going to write a bit more about Majora’s Mask and Pride and Prejudice here instead of going into a massive deep dive on how Breath of the Wild doesn’t have much story, but, hey, those are both pretty old (although to wildly different degrees) and I can’t imagine what analysis hasn’t been done for them yet. Although in between sessions writing this post, I have heard that - much like how Majora’s Mask has one of the few interesting stories in Zelda that gets to be About Something on a mostly subtextual level - the new Tears of the Kingdom apparently also gets to be deeply weird and About Something. So idk maybe this’ll force me to think more about Pride and Prejudice later, natrually.
I’ve joined the team at Kissing Dynamite as a Book Reviews Editor! I’ll be writing reviews of small press/self-published poetry books (the first one is now live), but I’ll also be editing other writers’ reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write!